Spencer and Patrick dissect The Matrix as a cult-escape allegory, contrasting it with modern conspiracy theories that claim hidden truths grant agency—like Neo’s bullet-stopping defiance—while others remain trapped. They explore the Wachowskis’ transgender identity shaping themes of self-determination, like the unused "Switch" character, and critique the film’s flawed portrayal of free will: if Machines control all senses, why can’t they suppress resistance entirely? The episode ties fatalism to conspiratorial delusions, where believers see themselves as exceptions, yet the narrative’s contradictions reveal Hollywood’s artificial stakes over real-world logic. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
And back again today with Patrick.
How are you doing, Patrick?
I'm doing good, Spencer.
How are you doing today?
Good.
Thank you for mentioning my name.
I keep forgetting to mention that I am Spencer and I'm the host of this podcast.
I don't know why I keep forgetting to do that.
I did it like every time for I don't know about 80 episodes.
And then somewhere after that, I just dropped off.
It's everybody knows.
So thank you for being a good co-host and picking up where I dropped the ball there.
Yeah.
I do what I can.
Great.
No, that's great.
So before we get started, if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about this podcast, anything you hear here, that email goes to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And also, spoiler warning for today, just in case anyone hasn't seen The Matrix and hasn't been completely spoiled by like 20% of every meme that's ever been created on the internet.
Yeah, this is your chance to duck now and go watch the movie before you come back to this podcast and listen.
We're not going to do like a beat-by-beat, play-by-play, scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie.
That's not what we're doing.
There's plenty of other podcasts that do that, and they do great work.
Some of them, some of them are just whatever.
I don't know.
I'm not going to point to a particular one.
I've heard some.
Some are good.
Some are just okay.
But plenty of people break down this movie.
There's lots in it.
So we're going to only hit a couple of beats that relate to what exactly we're talking about.
So, first of all, before I get into what this is, do you like this movie, Patrick?
Do you hate it?
What's your deal?
Oh, I really like this movie.
I think it was very provocative when it came out and it kind of stands the test of time.
I recently watched it in the last half a year and watched the whole series and enjoyed it.
So yeah, no, I really like this movie.
Great.
I needed you to do that.
So I had time to do something else here.
All right.
So I think I'm ready.
All right.
I have a little bit of, I have, I have like a neuroticism about these topics that I do because they're fairly complicated and I'm trying to explain something fairly complicated.
And I'm actually trying to not work with like a fixed script of the fixed things to say in this specific order in these exact words because I actually have a fair amount of problem with that.
I just, it just with the way my brain works, I don't, it doesn't work very well.
I do it if I have to, but I prefer to not do it that way.
So I just try to not do that.
So I worry when I do these that I'm not explaining things properly or well enough or anything else.
So I listened to the episode we did where we sort of introduced the topic, the sub-series, the way we're going to go about these.
And I got immediately worried that I didn't explain it well enough.
But I also worried that if I explained it more, I would be like over-explaining and like totally boring everyone.
So I'm like riding inside my brain, I'm riding like a very thin line.
And I'm like, you know, I'm walking a tight rope here.
I'm on.
Yeah.
So, well, I wrote a little bit of a script, a small bit, not like a full script, just a little bit, a couple things.
And I just, I'm just going to say these things that I prepared as a thing to try to help explain something because I'm worried.
I'm sure everyone understands, except that I'm worried that I wasn't understood.
We want to be concise.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Now that everyone understands that I'm a lunatic.
So in the introductory episode to this sub-series, I talked about how ideas presented in movies can become something that people compare with our world.
A piece of a model in our subjective minds that helps some of us build our view of reality.
So friend of the podcast, Stephen Mather, he used to host a podcast called Cult Hackers.
In one episode, he discussed at length this film as it relates to the idea of leaving a cult environment, something that he has a great amount of experience with.
I won't get into all that why.
He's been on five episodes of this podcast.
It's in there somewhere.
So we will discuss this movie from the other way as it relates to the ways in which the ideas and the metaphors that are used in the Matrix can assist someone to question the nature of their own objective reality.
In other words, the ways in which it might cause someone to leave reality and become more cultish, essentially, instead of what he was discussing, which was what he felt was real and leaving it to a more real thing, which is kind of what the Matrix is.
Only we're discussing it from the other side, as though you're in a real place and you're leaving it to go to a place that's less real, which is what we're kind of seeing in our real life as we're seeing more and more people become more and more conspiratorial.
So people are seeing things in movies and TV shows, and then at later moments in their lives, they're experiencing things that they're trying to understand.
And in their attempts to understand their lives and their experiences, they inevitably compare what they're currently experiencing to previous things that they've seen and experienced.
Some of those previous things are the fictional representations of our world as seen on film.
This happens in part because of a blurring of the lines between our own experiences and the vicarious experiences of others that we witness.
And that's why we're going through these, to identify some of the moments from our visual art that may be affecting how people are thinking about and interpreting the real world and helping them to how the art and what is happening there is helping them come to unhelpful conclusions.
So that's sort of my additional clarifying bit.
It might not have even been necessary, but I just to ease my own neurotic consciousness there.
Yeah.
So is that more clear or less clear than where we left off last time, Patrick?
I think that it clearly underlines the purpose of the discussion.
You know, last time we kind of got into a bit of our toolbox, maybe without saying like, why do we have a toolbox in the first place?
Like, I think that it's all good ground to cover, you know, and maybe sometimes we'll circle back.
Maybe sometimes we'll revise our or enhance our understanding.
But yeah, it's all good.
Cool.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you for alleviating my worries.
I want to be a good co-pilot.
Great.
But tell me when to.
Great.
You have to not just encourage me.
You also have to tell me when to, you know, steer one direction or the other.
Absolutely.
But yeah, yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you.
So again, we're not going to go through a full synopsis here, of course.
In the Matrix, first of all, before I start this, we need to, in our discussion of the film The Matrix, that has a device in it called The Matrix, we have to come up with some kind of way to refer to these two separate things that have the same name, one on top of another, in a way that doesn't become completely unworkable.
So I might say in the Matrix, but you might think in the movie The Matrix or like inside the Matrix when you're in the movie and then you go from like the Nebuchadnezzar to in the Matrix, right?
So like, so I think we should first agree to refer to the film as the Matrix.
And if you're thinking about being in the film, like a character in the film and their relationship to the technology in which humanity is trapped, we're going to call that, I arbitrarily picked the facade.
Okay.
Just the fake world, right?
It's not fancy.
And no one in the movie refers to it that way.
They all call it the Matrix, obviously, because their characters in the movie.
They don't know that they're in a movie, we think.
But we need a way to refer to it.
So that's just the way I came up with.
Sure.
So in the matrix.
I'll try to make that.
Yeah, okay.
In the matrix, the film, there exists the ability to completely and seamlessly replicate reality straight to the cerebral cortex of the human mind.
This movie openly plays with the idea that subjective and objective reality might be two completely separate things, a real world and a virtual world, the facade.
And if you were trapped in that facade, you might actually never know.
It's so seamless, you'll never realize that you're in it.
As is eventually revealed to the audience, only a small percentage of people ensnared in this way ever even wonder about whether it could be real.
This gives those who do question an air of importance and by necessity makes them the heroes of the story, right?
So obviously, most of this story is told from the perspective of the humans who escape, who leave the facade and become part of the group of plucky heroes who oppose the force that's holding humanity, you know, imprisoned.
They seek to end the facade.
Well, yeah, yeah.
They seek to free humanity from this, right?
That's what they, yeah.
And so this is sort of where we start.
This is everyone understands this about the matrix, right?
But this is where this is, these, this idea of the facade world in the film The Matrix is meshing with where people feel conspiracies are in our real life world, right?
That the conspiracies are existing.
You can't see them.
They're seamlessly interacting with our world in such a way that you'll never know that they're there, except for the few among us who can, you know, see the evidence, right?
And know what's happening by some kind of special pattern recognition of some sort.
And that's kind of, this is a thing that really is where the Matrix sits in our minds.
And most people who refer to the Matrix now refer to it from that perspective.
What do you think about that, Patrick?
Yeah, I think that the Matrix kind of put a bug in a lot of people's minds that maybe this simulation has glitches and that there's clues for us to see our way through and out of it possibly or to use this knowledge in some way to, I don't know, live a superior quality of life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's yeah, that's an interesting concept you bring about superior quality of life.
Because, of course, in the Matrix, it's argued that they're living a superior quality of life by being in the matrix.
Well, that depends on the value, though, because the value reflection there is, do you value reality?
Do you value truth?
If you do not do that.
The illusion of choice, right?
The illusion of choice.
You could become a very successful business person in the Matrix.
You could become a billionaire in the Matrix.
You could be a doctor and go to join an effort to create vaccines or disseminate vaccines to save thousands or even millions of lives in the Matrix, right?
But you can't do any of that stuff outside the Matrix because if you're outside the Matrix, you have to have your life be constantly chased down by robots that look to prevent you from affecting the Matrix.
And you have to constantly devote all your time and energy to this lower level of technology that you bend your effort, hopefully to save some more people from this fate, which the fate is, they, you know, as far as quality of life goes, many of them are living, you know, like aside from the fact that they're not the ones who are choosing what's really happening.
You know, so it's a matter of like self-determination.
They're not determining their reality.
Someone else is.
And that's kind of the real the real crime that we look at when we look at the matrix.
We think that the artificially intelligent computer that's running it all is bad because it's the determiner of our fate and we're not.
Right.
I think too, like there's something that remains constant whether you're inside the facade or whether you are outside the facade.
And that is that your own sense of agency, the way that you direct and choose things will have a very real impact on what your experience is.
So when you're inside the simulation, you are, you know, you are experiencing things as a result of your decisions.
But if you become aware that there's a truth that's present that you're not engaging with, that's where that value proposition comes, where possibly living a more gritty, more physically challenging, less sensory pleasing environment might give you a higher quality of life if your primary quality is the truth, knowing the truth of your reality.
Yeah, yeah.
Your choices are only useful if they're informed choices, right?
The people inside the matrix are not really informed about the true nature of their reality.
And therefore, we see their choices as being having no value at all, unless you're outside the matrix.
So once you're, when you're trapped in the matrix, you don't know about the fact that you're trapped in the matrix.
We see the people in that situation as having no real choice.
It's just an illusion.
Yeah.
Which is why we see, yeah.
I was gonna say, I don't know if this fast forwards in our discussion, but that's where you kind of see a bit of the friction between people that try to use this because they want some sort of value recognized because they have made a confrontation with what they consider the illusion or facade.
And they want some sort of credit for having chosen the thing that wasn't preferable or wasn't easy.
And so we see that analog a lot of the time in the discussions where, you know, I think that people, whether we call them closed-minded or not, they have closed their mind to the option that anybody who hasn't confronted what they've confronted has anything to contribute.
Yeah.
I don't know if I kind of went off the rails there a little bit, but no, no, that's good.
Yeah.
Sorry, I just got distracted by a thing.
I need to turn my phone off or put it down.
That's bad.
No worries.
So let's slip into this here.
I do have a couple of moments that we're going to use as touchstones for some of the moments to talk about.
I didn't bother to make them video clips.
I just made them audio clips.
It's an audio podcast that also goes to YouTube.
So this kind of levels the playing field for everyone, right?
People are just listening, get the same thing as the people who are watching.
But the people are watching get to see both of us.
Shiny, happy faces.
Yeah.
But anyway, the first thing I want to mention about this movie was that it does have an extra interesting part in that it was made by a pair of people that at the time we referred to as the Wachowski brothers.
And I remember that this was how they were credited in the first Matrix film, the Wachowski Brothers.
Since that time, that has changed.
They are now the Wachowski sisters.
They both transgender women.
At the time that this, in 1999, when this first came out, no one except for them, or maybe a few people close to them, but no one in the public life knew this about them.
So this hasn't become like much of a trans movie, right?
Like this, this isn't a movie that people trot out as a sign that, yes, some people point to trans people who have achieved some form of like celebrity and say, these are people who, you know, recognize us, make sure we don't disappear and that sort of thing.
But they don't really do that with the Wachowskis.
I don't really know why.
The Wachowskis wrote this film and it's sort of the ideas about its break in reality and the idea that you're living in a life that isn't really real and you might want to leave that life for perhaps a much more difficult life that's more real to you.
And they wrote that metaphor with the idea of being trans in mind, particularly.
And this adds, like if you examine the movie from that angle, it adds a bunch of interesting pieces that if you don't have that bit of information, don't really catch.
For example, one such one is that Was meant to be in the film, much more underlined in the film, but wasn't, was there's a character named Switch that was meant to be, I think, one gender on the Nebuchadnezzar in like the real world, and then have the opposite gender when they were in the facade world, right?
And this was supposed to be this extra thing, but I don't know, it didn't get included.
I'm not sure exactly why.
There might have been, you know, some executive somewhere that said, oh, you can't have this.
There might have been that they just didn't have the budget.
I don't really know.
But that was a thing.
The character was named Switch for that reason, that they were going to switch genders literally when they went in the Matrix.
And of course, when you're in the Matrix, you do have some control over what you look like.
You're not defined only by what you look like in the real world.
Everyone who was born, there I did it.
I said the Matrix instead of the facade.
When you're born in the facade, when you're born in the facade world, your body has all these little plugs and jacks on it.
And so when you're, you know, when those characters are on the Nebuchadnezzar, they have these things on their bodies for the, you know, the nutrients to get pumped in and for the information to get jacked into your brain.
But they don't have these when they're in the facade world because the way they imagine themselves is different than, you know, the way that they are, right?
So this is already like this sci-fi version of you get to kind of be who you really want to be, which I think was part of what they were going for in a roundabout sort of way when they made this movie originally.
They weren't really thinking about conspiracies.
They weren't really thinking about this in that way.
But like most art, the artist doesn't really get to control the way everyone else interprets their work.
So in the metaphor that they created, this just landed way harder for people who had conspiracy notions than it ever did for trans people.
I think that's already fairly interesting, that they weren't really going for one, they were going for a different one, and then it just worked better for this one.
I mean, that sort of thing happens in art all the time.
There's a huge number of songs that meant one thing and are taken in a totally different way.
And, you know, c'est la vie.
That's, you know, the audience gets to make up its own mind what they think of your art.
That's but we're going to start with the one we have to start with you.
You always have to go first with the red and the blue pill.
This moment where, you know, we see it through the perspective of Morpheus saying this to the character Neo.
You're making a literal choice between two realities.
And it's a choice that we presume, at first, we sort of assume that is a one, one-way decision.
You can't be halfway.
You have to make this choice.
And from this moment on, you either have to carry on as though, you know, no one ever made this proposition to you.
It was just some kind of weird dream.
Or you come with us and you become part of the real world and your decisions have consequences is more or less the choice that's being made here.
So I'm going to play a little clip.
It's just a half minute or so of the audio of this pitch being made, and then we'll talk about it.
Let me tell you why you're here.
You're here because you know something.
What you know you can't explain, but you feel it.
You felt it your entire life.
That there's something wrong with the world.
You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
It is this feeling that has brought you to me.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
The Matrix.
Yeah, so he didn't mention the red or blue pill.
I didn't find that part very compelling, not nearly as much as this moment, where he's introducing the idea that you, you know, has that conspiratorial feel.
You know, there's something wrong with the world.
And then no specific reference to what it is that Neo feels he knows is wrong with the world.
Just a reference to it as a splinter in your mind.
A sense of unease.
Yeah.
And then it's leads off essentially to an assumption that, you know, yes, you know that there's this problem with the world and I know how to fix it.
Come with me and we'll fix it together.
And this is the pitch, right?
This is this moment.
And I think these words, and first of all, how great is Lawrence Fishburne, right?
Man, I could listen to that guy.
I wish he just read audiobooks and just, yeah.
Yeah, he's amazing.
But this pitch to be like, you know, we all know there's something wrong with the world.
This is incredibly vague.
So to then say, yeah, you know something's wrong with the world.
I have the solution.
The solution is that, you know, the Illuminati are running the central bank to control everything.
I have the solution.
The solution is that the UN has cobbled together to lie to you about the shape of the planet and it's really flat.
No one knows why that makes sense.
But to some small percentage of the population, it does make sense, weirdly.
We don't know why, because it's hard for us to see it from their perspective.
But what they all agree on and what they all agree with me on is that there is something wrong with the world.
But, you know, getting to the point where it get that step from, yes, there is something wrong with the world to, okay, so now we have to, you know, get rid of all the vaccinations or, you know, what are the other flavors of this?
We have to, you know, be racist against some specific group because they're the group that's making everything terrible or whatever.
This gap between there's a problem and there's a solution is this murky black box gap that's essentially being used by Morpheus to recruit Neo.
But this is essentially a big thing that's being used to recruit everyone into a more conspiratorial mindset, right?
Like this pitch by Morpheus, that is the pitch.
That's the heart of every pitch in this world.
And I think this moment, this is a big reason why this was a big moment for a lot of people, because we do think there are things that are just not real in our world.
We do think there's people lying to us all the time.
I think the core of it is the nature of deception.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Being able to identify the deception or to be able to plant the seed that what you're seeing is not merely the product of your ignorance, like used academically, like what you don't know, but actually is the machine effort to deceive you specifically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's the heart of the Matrix.
That's, I mean, the, that's everything that the, the, you know, machines, we don't really have an embodiment of them.
The only embodiment we have in this first movie is Agent Smith.
He's kind of the highest ranking program that we run into.
And even that, he's only a program.
He's not a thing.
He's just software, which everything in the Matrix is kind of just software.
I don't know.
It's just a manifest, you know, they all have avatars.
And yeah.
So, yeah, this, this moment, this moment and this pitch, this is the one that sticks with us more than any other.
Actually, you know, if I can extend that, because I know that like right after that clip, then begins the presentation of the red pill, blue pill.
And I think that's actually worth looking at in terms of this discussion because it's a character check.
When Neo is presented with that choice, that you can either take the red pill and see how far this rabbit hole goes, or you can return back to the life that you know with no clue that any of this ever happened.
The character choice there is: do you accept and willingly receive the deception, knowing now that you have seen some nature of it?
You've seen some clue, some glimmer of the underlying structure.
Only people that have the good character will say, okay, I want to shed myself of the illusion and choose to know the true nature of things.
Okay, but let me flip that on you, Patrick.
Sure.
What if it's only the people who choose the red pill are the ones that we upon which we bestow the mantle of good character?
I think that's true, though.
We do bestow that character of being good for saying that I will not accept deception.
Right, right.
Okay, but what if Morpheus is the one who's deceiving here?
Like, I don't know.
That's a prior pass.
Motivations, right?
Well, in the context of the film, we come to not understand this because there is a thing called a Nebuchadnezzar.
And there is a moment, like he lives through this moment where he gets pulled out of a vat of goo, right?
And, you know, it's been feeding him intravenously his whole life.
And he does all these other things.
And it takes, it's not clear how long, weeks, months?
It's unclear how long he takes after getting out of the vat of goo to like be, you know, learn the kung fu and be ready.
We're told that it's faster than anyone else or whatever.
But what does that mean?
Faster than anyone else.
So, you know, it never says, it never gives us a timeframe.
And of course, there's also a lot of things.
It's just no plot that he's the chosen one, right?
Yeah, yeah.
He's, he's, he's the one.
You know, you got to go talk to the lady and she'll find that, you know, she'll tell you things.
And so that, that, that becomes, but among people who, who think of themselves, think of the world from a conspiratorial perspective, they universally think of the willingness to uh, disbelieve the official bits of the world, the willingness to,
to not believe those is the thing that's called good.
And this is also why most of these beliefs tend to blur in with each other and associate with each other.
Because each of these individual groups that has individual beliefs the flat earth community, the anti-vax community, the Q AND ON community the the, you know all the other different, disparate groups that have actual different beliefs those beliefs start to bleed in together because on some basic level they all believe that, even if that other group doesn't believe the exact same things we believe we do.
Like that, they took the red pill that they're willing to at least not believe the you know the story that's being told to us, right?
So, or express doubt, even well, or at least express doubt.
But like they, they understand that even you know the the, the Q AND Honors will look at the flat earthers and kind of sneer, but deep down inside like yeah, but at least they're not going to just believe the mainstream media as it tells us everything right um, and that's, that's a part of this too, is that uh, we're not going to cover.
I've already determined I don't care how much complaining there is we're not going to cover parts two and three as movies.
They're just okay.
Um, if I have to do another episode where I talk about the matrix, i'm fine.
But and i'll include little bits of it but um, in those subsequent films we learn that there are other ships than the Nebuchadnezzar and there's other captains, and it's a bigger world on the outside of the facade world right, and and they don't always agree with each other on exactly how to do things, and that's, you know, interesting or whatever.
Uh, but that's almost like another direct analog of how all these sort of conspiratorial groups sort of associate, they, they have a general goal, a common goal among themselves, of sort of a, an imagined takedown of the entity that's trying to deceive them, and that's, that's the the, the essence of recognizing that, even if the you know,
the Q and honors will look again, look at the flat Earthers whatever, and say well, at least they're willing to take the red pill if we needed something, if we could point to the, you know, found the heart of the thing, to take it out.
We know that they would work on taking that out just as much as we would, because that's that's the point.
Right is to get rid of the deception.
Um, to all of them.
It's almost always the mainstream media is the main enemy.
That's kind of whatever uh, but yeah, so I don't think we need to talk about that anymore.
It was, it's good.
I want to get to the other ones.
They're to me.
They're more interesting actually than the red blue pill.
Um, so we have, we have a a running theme throughout this movie, and less so in the subsequent two about uh fate right, it's.
It's mentioned several times, in fact, sort of like I think it's just before this, the clip I just showed, uh uh, they mentioned fate there.
I, I think uh um uh, Morpheus says something about ask them a question and why do you do what you do?
And Neo says because I I, I don't like the idea that someone is choosing everything for me.
I want, I want my life to be my own, like I know.
I want to choose my own fate, kind of thing.
But we're not going to pick that moment to have a clip of.
I actually have a different moment.
Get it ready here.
Which is the well I'll, I'll just play it.
I'll just play it man God, tell everyone everything and then do it.
Here we go, but you're not going to anything and don't worry about the phase or that phase.
I'm sorry, I said don't worry about it, I'll get one of my kids to fix it.
How did you know?
Oh, what's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything right?
So this, I felt, was just one clip that caught the one moment where they they circle back on this, this idea of, do you really make choices that could change what happens in the future?
Is your fate a fixed destiny or is it something that you can make a decision that's free of that fixed destiny?
Right, are we in a determinative universe or do we have like true, true free will in the freest sense?
I've consistently avoided, in a hundred and whatever, 22 episodes or something so far of the whole discussion of free will from the what might be called like the Sam Harris free will perspective of the.
He wrote a book called free will and he has a whole spiel about it.
He does all the time about free will and determinism and and what those are.
It's, it's interesting, but I'm I I kind of avoid it, I kind of hate it.
I suspect that there's something else happening there that I can't prove in any way, and so I just avoid it.
But from this perspective of this movie, what we have is we have an artificially intelligent machine that is running many parallel programs that are making predictions about the choices of the minds of the people in that are inside.
Right, that's essentially exactly what we have, and so each of the minds inside is trying to work out the value of their choices, and we discussed already at the at the start that we as the audience and the characters who have uh, come out of the facade world, tend to feel that the the value of the choices of the people inside that world are effectively null because they have no determining, Determining factor.
Nothing they do will make any real change in the greater outcome of anything.
Like it'd almost be negative because they're acting as batteries to continue running the machine that has enslaved us.
Yeah.
So we're rooting against the end of that machine and the end of enslavement, right?
I don't know.
That's just kind of my take on it, right?
Like, yeah, I don't sure.
Their decisions don't impact the real world, except that insofar as if maybe everybody in the Matrix woke up and things came flying off everybody.
Well, then what is that machine running on in this new world, right?
Well, okay, but why don't they just start slipping red pills into everyone's drink?
I think that the pill itself, while he does say the authority, just pour it in the water.
What are you doing?
These red pills are very expensive, even inside the facade.
Yeah, wow.
What does expensive even mean when you're making up your own reality?
I don't know.
Facade dollars.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Like Canadian tire bucks.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
So, but here we have another circle back on it.
And at first, at first glance, like years ago when I looked at this movie and was thinking about it idly in my time, I kind of thought to myself that this whole thing about fate, it was just an extra bit that they're putting in to sound more clever than they probably really are, these people writing the film or whatever.
But now, of course, I have a more wise.
I'm older.
I don't know if you noticed.
I'm older and I feel that I've seen more life and I understand more things.
And I think, of course, that I was wrong when I thought that earlier.
I think that this is a bigger part of the story, about the point of the story.
That the whole reason why, I mean, in the context of the film, the whole reason why Neo is the one is because he is essentially the only one who can make choices about his virtual world.
When he's in the virtual world, in a facade, he's the only one that can really make truly determinative choices.
He can break free of all the things that are being thrown at him as reality.
I mean, there's a bullet going towards him and he's able to stop it, right?
He's able to slow down time and make it just go away.
He's able to hold up his hand.
All the bullets just stop, you know, and no one else can do that.
Even the agents can't do that.
They know more.
They're essentially looking past what would be like the fourth wall of the facade world, right?
Because they know that they're in a facade world at the very least.
But they can't do that.
You know, their bodies can survive a bullet because apparently they just know it's not real.
So who cares, you know?
But they also can't control his ability to do that.
And they have the bird's eye view on the source code, right?
Yeah, yeah.
He's just intuiting it, I feel.
Right, right.
And so how this occurs is never explained.
It's a black box device.
How, I mean, even when you go into hacker films, I mean, there's plenty of movies and TV shows that include hackers or whatever.
It never tells you how the hacking works, right?
This is a person that might as well be in a wizard hat that just kind of, you know, uses a Harry Potter wand and, you know, says some words in Latin and, you know, levio sal, whatever, and poof, and then it's done.
Yeah, that's essentially the level of thing that's happening here.
We're left to, you know, we imagine that it's, you know, we would rather see them punch each other with kung fu than to see like it's much more boring to think of them that, you know, in this scene where it's Morpheus and Neo and they're doing the kung fu against each other.
It would be pretty boring if it was two guys at two terminals madly typing in there, sending bits of code at each other.
Like, no, I'll get you this one.
No, you blocked that one.
That would be incredibly boring.
No one's going to watch that, right?
So having everything have these avatars, but then a bullet, like, why, you know, like, like, what does a gun even mean in this context?
Like, doesn't, you know, make a lot of sense.
But as far as choices go, Neo is the only one who can make choices that really matter.
He's the one who can, who can express true free will.
A sequence of events that leads to a bullet killing you would be completely beyond your control for everyone except him.
So this is sort of the heart of the piece.
And I think it's a thing that people think about with their how they view reality, right?
How they view the world.
Can they really make a choice that will make a difference about the future?
Can they really make it, or will it, if there's doom on the horizon and I don't know, the planet is going to escalate in temperature until all the plants die off and then we just all starve and eventually die as a species.
If that's just going to happen, then what choice could we ever make that's going to make any difference?
This is sort of a level of fatalism that has sort of seeped into our culture in this way.
No single one of us feels like we have choices that matter in our greater world, right?
When you vote, there's a lot of people who just don't vote because they don't think that their singular vote will really make a difference in the total outcome of a really large election.
And some portion of us just sort of weirdly feel that way.
And I think, yeah, I think they should probably still vote.
But some of them, even if you manage to get some of them to, some portion still wouldn't.
It's just a thing.
And I think this idea that their choices don't matter is at the heart of that set of choices.
Where am I going with this, Patrick?
Save me.
I'm rambling.
Well, I think if we tie it to conspiratorial thinking, I think that for people who give themselves permission to dismiss certain beliefs because they've been presented with something that is attractive because it makes them special.
It makes them feel like they are the one for them to say, oh, no, I don't believe that the world is round.
That is their stopping of the bullet because the bullet reaching them would be, you know, them having to believe like the rest of us that there's overwhelming evidence.
Yeah, right.
This is why you're here.
This is why I asked you to do this.
Oh, good.
That was great.
You earned your keep just there.
Oh, good.
Yeah.
All right.
So Leave it on my notes.
I'm going to do the last one myself.
This paperwork.
Okay, so we'll do the next bit here.
There's another moment that a lot of people refer to, and this is what encapsulates it here.
Let's do this.
Do not try and bend the spoon.
That's impossible.
Dead, only try to realize the truth.
What truth?
There is no spoon.
There is no spoon.
Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends.
It is only yourself.
So, yeah, this is a, to me, this is the biggest reason to come and want to discuss some of the things in this movie.
This, there is no spoon.
You bend your mind, right?
To me, what I think they're going for, you know, when they wrote it, was this idea, again, that you have some say, you have some power over how you interpret the world that determines something about yourself.
But it leaves behind this idea that you can reimagine parts of reality to suit yourself.
And if your will is strong enough to ignore enough of reality, you can create your own reality.
And this is part of what's contained in the idea that there is no spoon.
And it's that you bend your mind.
And this is a mind-breaking sort of idea that you can create your own reality that, yeah, no one else knows that I can bend spoons.
Who cares?
I can bend spoons and it's good enough for me.
No one else realizes that the earth is flat, but who cares?
I realize it.
I'm good, right?
I know that the truth.
And despite the fact that everyone is going to try to, if I mention it, everyone's going to try to convince me it's not because they're in on it or whatever.
Yeah, where are you on this, Patrick?
This idea that people take this idea and try to use it in some small way, get the idea that they can create their own world, their own reality that significantly, sometimes significantly parts from objective reality.
Well, first of all, I want to see their cutlery drawer and see if any of that's come to bear, right?
Because I think that for a person to really subscribe to that belief and make it a center point of their way of being, you know, I don't know.
You know, I think people are, to different degrees, are convinced by things either more easily or less easily than others.
I think that it's a really provocative idea.
I think it's worth everybody kind of engages with that idea to some extent because probably there's a lot of discussion too about, well, what is there such a thing as objective reality in the first place?
I look at a lot of what informs and kind of governs people's attitudes towards how they fit in the world.
And two different ideas that I have found useful to compare and contrast are that or just as it's encapsulated in one kind of statement is that there is not one world.
There are, you know, like if there's seven billion people, there are seven billion worlds.
Each person carries a representation of that world.
And that's all well and fine, as long as the boundary of that belief doesn't overlap or affect or, you know, impact other worlds.
But we do consistently find ourselves sharing this community, this common space of this planet or where we live and things like that.
And so I don't know.
I don't know how useful it would be for me, you know, if I'm holding a spoon and I think it's bending and everyone else can still eat with it, despite in my mind it's twisted.
So I don't know.
I don't see I don't see a lot of use in carrying it beyond asking yourself the question and having that kind of little, you know, wiggle in your psyche of wondering, you know, how many things does this apply to?
It probably applies to some things.
There are things that, you know, part of our worldview are only informed by our belief, but some of it has to be informed by what we're receiving in terms of sensory information or communication from other people.
Yeah.
So first of all, we don't have to get into it now, but I assure you, objective reality exists.
Sure.
We can go over another day if you like.
Well, if the tree falls in the forest.
It does make a sound, and even if no one's there to hear it.
Because I know the factors that make it happen and they will still be factors even if no one's there.
Okay, but sound is a perception.
Right?
Sound is a perception of particles traveling through a medium.
Okay.
That's the case.
That is the case.
You only hear it because those vibrations vibrate.
Well, it could be the case that what you hear when you hear a tree falling is slightly different than what I hear when I hear a tree falling.
That might be.
In the same way that it might be that the thing that I call yellow might actually look different to you when you look at that same yellow thing.
But if you understand it as yellow and I understand it as yellow and it has light of a specific wavelength that is the light that we, you know, that wavelength is that wavelength regardless of any other factor.
That's objective reality.
But what's interesting to me is that not only is this in this situation, this purports to create the idea that the spoon doesn't bend, that the mind bends.
No one who generally discusses this discusses the fact that this is already, as it's portrayed within the film, a flawed metaphor, because it means that whoever this kind of oddly creepy British child is is bending Neo's mind when Neo looks at the child holding the spoon up and bending the spoon.
Yeah.
That's what that would mean, right?
Like, but how did the child bending their mind then bend Neo's mind?
Right, right, right.
I bent my mind and you saw it happen.
You see my mind bend?
You saw the spoon bend.
Like, already this is a flawed metaphor.
It sort of works because we don't know what's really happening in the, you know, and the matrix is just a facade.
It's just a visual and audible sort of interface with the world.
Presumably you can taste and smell things there too.
Whatever.
It's just for our sensory phenomenon.
But yeah, essentially what this child is saying is, hey, fucko, I just bent your mind.
How do you feel about that?
You know, like, but we tend to not look at that at first, right?
It's this sort of, it almost leans on some things that happen with, like, sleight of hand magicians who appear to bend cutlery and spoons and this sort of thing, right?
They do these things.
They do illusions, sleight of hand illusions like this, and they're not really bending spoons in the way that they're doing them.
It's a neat trick.
But again, they're also not bending spoons.
That's impossible.
Or it is impossible to do it in the way that they're pretending to do it, right?
I think that I even have a few other episodes.
I had an episode about belief itself in which I discussed how some people have come to believe that they can create the world in using their will, if they express their will strong enough, that the world will sort of move aside.
I mean, this is sort of the idea that comes apart in this book, The Secret, that was sort of pushed by Oprah for a very long time, that there's a secret to how to succeed.
And that this is just thinking positively and the world just opens up for you.
And it's super easy to say, but it's just, it's actually much more likely that the people who succeeded were lucky.
And it didn't have anything.
In fact, I imagine there's plenty of cranky people who got lucky enough to become rich, too.
They weren't positive at all and they became famously rich.
I think we can even find some in our world now, right?
I think the purpose and the point of the secret, I mean, the takeaway there that, like, I mean, in a very concrete sense is that our attitude directly impacts what we see in our world.
And people who don't believe things are impossible will not take the steps to make those things manifest, right?
In the way that it creates choices.
Yeah.
That's a realistic interpretation.
The secret itself being like, oh, well, just think and believe was a little woo-woo.
Yeah, you know, that leads to beliefs like it's not really a disease that's killing you.
It's just dis-ease.
And if you just stop thinking so badly about this thing that's killing you, it won't kill you anymore.
It's just the power of this word that you've allowed to infect your brain, which isn't how objective reality works.
You know, you can have a disease that's killing you whether you believe it or not, right?
That's, that's, yeah.
So I want to move on before we kind of run out the clock here on another aspect of this movie.
I don't have a clip to go with it.
So, but there is a running, it's not really a theme that they meant as a theme of the film, but it is a sort of a, like almost like a trope that gets transported and sort of placed also upon many of our conspiracy beliefs that some people who point out the sort of unwieldiness or unlikeliness of some of the greater,
you know, more ridiculous conspiracy beliefs, what they try to point out about it, which is that what you tend to get in like a grand conspiracy is an imagined powerful group of people, usually people, sometimes aliens, sometimes lizard aliens, whatever.
Someone has to be the architect.
Someone, yep, someone has to be sort of the thing in charge of controlling you.
There's a group that's all-powerful and in control of basically everything, but they're also completely inept and unable to stop the plucky heroes from probably winning.
And this disparity in power level is, I think, probably has no greater disparity than is displayed in The Matrix.
Because in 1999, we didn't have a domestic spying program.
Like a national security advisor hadn't been caught by, you know, Kevin Snowden hadn't left and published a bunch of documents that showed that the NSA was trying to collect a truly massive amount of data on literally everyone to try to, you know, stop, you know, they said stop things from happening that were bad, but was also kind of spying on ordinary citizens because no one really believed that a computer could be,
a set of computers could have enough memory and power and everything to actually sift through all that data at that point in time.
Which is why it's not really an idea that shows up in the Matrix.
But now we all have this idea that, yes, they definitely could by, what was that, year 2010, 2011?
I don't even know when Kevin Snowden.
Kevin Snowden?
No, Kevin Snowden's not the guy.
Edward Snowden.
Edward Snowden was his name.
He left the NSA as a contractor to do all the things he did to publish all the documents.
And he that was part of a program to do that.
Literally, if you had a computer that could put every bit of information into your brain about the world, you wouldn't stand a chance.
You would barely be able to think anything that was outside of a certain set of norms without that computer going, oh, I know about this guy.
He's going to steal candy.
Watch him.
He's going to steal from this candy drawer come up.
Yeah, he's going to do it.
In fact, I can even do things that encourage him to steal that candy.
Is he hungry?
Oh, yeah, he's hungry.
I know.
I made him hungry.
I have control over his brain.
I can make him hungry because he can't really feel his stomach.
I tell him what he's feeling, right?
Like, if you had a machine that had that much control over you, that it controlled when you felt hungry, when you smelled certain things, like a thing that was dangerous or whatever, you wouldn't have senses.
You would have only whatever senses that machine let you have because it's literally giving the information to you.
And so the idea that this machine could be doing that, control all the sensory information you receive, but still be unable to deceive you enough to prevent you from working with anyone else to do anything.
Like you might walk up in the facade world, you walk up to someone in the street.
You think that's a person.
Could be another program.
Could be that everyone you know is a program.
None of them are people, right?
Like it could be a separate facade world for every person.
It would be somewhat more efficient if they were all in the same or just in a, you know, one million per facade world kind of thing.
But if the machine is literally giving you every bit of information that you have, it wouldn't let you read dangerous literature.
And it wouldn't need to have a book burning in order to prevent you from reading dangerous literature.
Anything that it thought could allow you to form independent thought.
You know, what, 1984?
That's not a book.
That's not a book that it would let you read.
Are you kidding me?
Animal Farm?
There's no book called Animal Farm.
You're going to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and that's as dangerous as it's ever going to get.
Great book.
You'll be so entertained.
You'll know where your towels are.
Yeah, that's right.
You'll read Infinite Jest, and you'll read all kinds of other great fiction that will not lead you or encourage you in any way to think anything other than what it wants you to think.
And that's it.
It has that much control.
So, like, but the idea that it's completely unable to stop these humans from, you know, countering it in this way, it's a thing that it doesn't work.
It doesn't work.
These two things don't work.
So, and of course, this is a trope that needs to, that is amplified by Hollywood movies in this way.
The antagonist of the film needs to be powerful and dangerous.
Always.
Because why do you have a film at all if the enemy isn't, you know, if they're just mundane?
You're not going to tell that story.
No one's going to want to go to see that movie.
Yeah.
But you also need your heroes to have long odds of winning and also to win.
So your antagonist needs to be powerful, but also unable to stop the heroes.
So in films like, I don't know, Spider-Man, right?
You kind of get this, there's going to be a powerful villain and then Spider-Man has, you know, powers of his own and he can overcome and that's great.
That's less of an idea of this.
But in this story, this idea, the Matrix literally, the facade, the machine controlling the facade literally controls everything.
Much more so than like the idea of the deep state or the Illuminati or whatever the hell it is David Icke talks about with the lizard people.
Much more so than them.
It controls literally everything everyone sees, hears, feels, smells, tastes.
Yeah, it seems really weird that that machine intelligence would be aware and orchestrating and responsible for all communication that we regard as senses and yet not be in control of be like, you know, oh, these people are meeting up somewhere and conspiring against suspicious.
Like you're the one feeding that information into that human being.
You're the one letting them see that street.
Yeah, that street corner or the alleyway or whatever where they're meeting.
You're the one letting them see that alleyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why don't you make it a bar mitzvah and put a bunch of, you know, fake people around there or whatever that are, you know, make it anything else.
I don't know.
Yeah.
The precipice of a volcano.
I don't know.
It could be anything.
Literally anything.
Blair sirens when they try to talk so they can't speak loud enough to hear each other.
Like so easy to prevent them from coordinating.
And that's an idea that sticks, that is presented in the Matrix.
It's not explicitly stated, but it carries through.
I mean, that thread, I mean, it's a, when I say common Hollywood trope for a reason, because these Hollywood movies, they need a very dangerous villain and also a group of plucky heroes that defeat it.
And they need to have that disparity.
But that's a fictional disparity.
That's not a thing that arises out of real life.
Right?
So, yeah.
That's where I'm at.
That's where I got to.
We have there's a bunch of other themes that are in the Matrix that either didn't have time for or just got pushed to lower on the priority scale to not get mentioned.
But I'm going to mention them as a thought that if people send me feedback that they'd like to hear those ones as well, we'll do another episode of The Matrix.
I don't care.
It's a great movie.
Yeah.
And I'm going to list them.
Let me get to the list and then I'll list them.
That's the order of events because it's cause and effect.
Okay.
So Cypher being treasonous.
That's one we don't have time for because we're running out of time right now.
We were going to mention today, but you know, some future episode, maybe if we ever do it.
Cypher is an incel.
That's a fun topic.
But we're not going to get to it.
Humans as a virus is a thing that's pretty much explicitly stated at one point in the film.
Has a great clip.
It's another one that a lot of people refer to a lot, but we're not going to mention it.
Obviously, we don't have time.
We're not going to mention it.
There's a huge number of Alice in Wonderland comparisons.
That might be a fun to do an episode just about Alice in Wonderland and then reference The Matrix from it.
Because it has this whole mirror world imaginary realm aspect to it.
I don't know.
Well, it's introduced too when Morpheus mentions the rabbit hole.
Like that's a direct reference.
Yeah, I mean, there's many other, there's other direct reference to there's tattoos that are shown that have the white rabbit and follow the right rabbit is the things mentioned in the beginning.
There's many other points too where there's this, you know, they were very obviously using that as a as a touchstone for their work.
And now I say other people who make conspiracy stories use this movie as a touchstone for their own conspiracy story work.
So, you know, on the artistry goes, right?
And of course, in the Matrix, the film, there's all kinds of things going on with reflections.
They're not usually directly referenced, but there's a huge number of reflections in the filmography and the actual camera work that are really interesting.
I don't know.
I determined that we're not going to talk about that unless, I don't know, someone decides it's something that they really want to hear about.
So with that, those are the things we're not discussing.
And yeah, so how would it be interesting?
Yeah.
I was just going to say, it'd be interesting to hear from anybody watching this if they think that they had an alternative interpretation of some of the things we talked about, or maybe if we left something on the table that was kind of germane to the discussion.
Well, yeah, something like that.
Too bad you didn't mention that.
You really flubbed that one.
Sorry, everybody.
Well, you know, undoubtedly we did miss stuff.
We're not perfect.
I never said I was perfect.
It'd be nice to see I am perfect the podcast.
It'd be nice to see what kind of engagement that this possibly triggers, right?
I'm terrible at creating engagement about the podcast.
It's a thing.
So, yeah.
Everybody write in.
If you watch this, just write in zone.
Spencer, no, that's Spencer, how much you like the podcast.
Yeah, truth unrestricted at gmail.com.
Or Twitter or Facebook or wherever you happen to know that I go.
I also go to Blue Sky every once in a while.
If I had more feedback there, I'd go there more often.
I'm probably not going back to threads very often, though.
Sorry.
Sorry for anyone who goes to threads.
It's kind of terrible.
Sorry.
It's just kind of dull.
That's how I feel about Blue Sky, but whatever.
Well, you know, I know a lot of people who went to Blue Sky and they like it.
So I guess there must be something good happening there.
I don't know.
I just don't know what it is.
So I don't want to trash it right now.
I'm not trashing it, but when I first went there, it was basically 80% of people were self-congratulating themselves for not being on Twitter anymore.
And I was like, I don't know if that's a platform for me.
Yeah, I don't know.
If your whole identity is that you're not the other identity, then yeah.
I think they got over that after a couple of weeks.
I don't know.
Oh, good.
Good.
That was threads for a bit, too, at the very start, though.
It was like, oh, there's so many people here.
Look at how many, yeah, look at all the things.
We're just like that other place.
Like, okay, calm down.
I don't know.
I'm not saying the other place is great either.
Don't get me wrong.
Just that when I want to find out what all the deranged people are thinking and saying, that's where I go.
If you want to sample from the Petri dish, you want the Petri dish that has the most interesting things going on.